The invention relates generally to clocks. More specifically, the invention is a system, apparatus and method for displaying the time of day (collectively the “system”).
Many historians believe that mankind's use of clocks can be traced back to Egyptian sundials going back as far as four thousand years ago. Since those first steps by human beings to track the time of day, people have become increasingly dependent on the ability to accurately tell time. Time is a dimension in which events can be ordered from the past through the present, and into the future. Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in the International System of Units. The ability to accurately determine the time of day (i.e. to tell time) has important implications in the daily lives of most human beings.
Most mechanisms that convey information relating to the time of day rely exclusively or at least primarily on visual indicia (i.e. the sense of sight) to convey the time of day. Most clocks are read, not heard, touched, tasted or smelled. Acoustic and tactile indicia sometimes serve as limited special case supplemental sources of time information. Sounds, such as the chimes of a grandfather clock or the activation of an alarm, are the most common examples of secondary indicators, but such indicators are limited to a specific subset of times, such as the on the hour or a pre-set alarm time. With the increasing popularity of smart phones and other forms of remote computing, the sense of touch is sometimes utilized in providing tactile (i.e. vibration) alarms that relate to time of day. The senses of taste and smell are not used for the purposes of conveying time of day information.
Given the heavy reliance on the sense of sight, poor vision can substantially impede the ability of a person to accurately tell the time in a convenient manner. An estimated 75% of Americans rely on some type of vision correction devices such as glasses or contact lenses. During the course of the day, glasses or contact lenses can substantially remedy deficiencies in eyesight.
Unfortunately, there are certain contexts where vision correction devices such as glasses or contact lenses are not convenient for many users. One such prominent example is during the period of time from when someone is about to go sleep through the time they get up from bed. Conventional glasses can be easily damaged or misplaced as a result of normal motions of a human body while he or she is unconscious sleeping. Many types of contact lenses cannot be safely worn while asleep. While there are some specialized devices that can be worn for the purposes of vision correction during sleeping hours, such devices are relatively expensive for such highly specialized usage and are often undesirable for other reasons.
When a person suffering for significant vision wakes up in the middle of the night, the otherwise simple task of determining the time can be quite difficult. Poor vision couple with the grogginess of having just woken up leaves many people fumbling for their glasses, a light switch, or some other effort just to determine the current time of night. The negative impact of such struggling often impacts other people in the household.
The problem of night time/early morning clock reading is not a trivial one. The number one aspect that corrective surgery patients note after a successful procedure is the ability to read a bedside clock in the evening or in the morning. Unfortunately, not all vision impaired individuals are good candidates for corrective.
For many vision impaired individuals, increased font size is not a useful solution, even within three feet. At greater distances, increased font size is even less useful. Increased brightness is also of limited assistance, particularly for a person of elevated correction greater than a magnitude of +3 or −3.